Inside the vast liberal conspiracy

Picture this: millionaires and billionaires gathering under tight security in fancy hotels with powerful politicians and operatives to plot how their network of secret-money groups can engineer a permanent realignment of American politics.

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Why do politicians run from this reporter?

The 21 groups at the core of the Democracy Alliance’s portfolio intend to spend $374 million during the midterm election cycle — including nearly $200 million this year — to boost liberal candidates and causes in 2014 and beyond, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.

While growing sums of that cash are being spent vilifying the billionaire conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch over their own network’s political spending, the documents reveal the extent to which the Democracy Alliance network mirrors the Kochs’ — and is obsessed with it.

“Conservatives, particularly the Koch Brothers, are playing for keeps with an even more pronounced financial advantages than in recent election cycles,” reads the introduction to a 62-page briefing book provided to donors ahead of April’s annual spring meeting of the DA, as the club is known, at Chicago’s tony Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The briefing book reveals a sort of DA-funded extra-party political machine that includes sophisticated voter databases and plans to mobilize pivotal Democratic voting blocs, air ads boosting Democratic candidates, while also — perhaps ironically — working to reduce the influence of money in politics.

Democracy Alliance officials did not dispute the authenticity of the document but declined to comment on it.

It makes public for the first time details of the complete organizational flowchart of the big-money left, including up-to-date budget figures and forecasts, program goals and performance assessments for the 21 core DA groups, including the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, America Votes and the Obama-linked Organizing for Action.

It also includes a “Progressive Infrastructure Map,” with 172 other groups to which the DA recommends that its rich liberal members — including billionaire financier George Soros and Houston trial lawyers Amber and Steve Mostyn — donate.

Private political networks like those backed by the DA and the Koch operation have become increasingly prominent in American politics. Over the past seven years, federal court decisions including the Supreme Court’s seminal 2010 Citizens United ruling have expanded megacheck spending in elections. Money and control have increasingly migrated from political parties and candidates’ campaigns, which still must abide by contribution limits and disclosure requirements, to outside groups like those in the DA that can accept unlimited — and mostly anonymous — contributions.

“The truth is political strategists and funders frequently gather to discuss their plans without inviting reporters to listen in,” said DA spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller. “The Democracy Alliance was organized to provide a forum for people with a shared set of principles to coordinate their resources more efficiently and effectively to achieve their common goals – it doesn’t represent a single industry or family, and doesn’t give money directly to organizations.”

But when it comes to sheer volume of cash, the DA isn’t in the same league as the Koch network. While the DA takes credit for steering more than $500 million in donations to recommended groups since its creation in 2005, the Koch network spent more than $400 million in 2012 alone.

Koch network donors are expected to provide almost every penny of the Koch operation’s $290 million 2014 spending goal. By contrast, DA donors — or “partners,” in the club’s parlance — are projected to provide a maximum of $39 million toward the $200 million 2014 spending goal of the 21 core DA groups, according to the briefing booklet. That means most of the cash raised by DA-linked groups actually comes from donors, institutions or revenue streams outside the DA’s cloistered ranks. Another difference: While DA partners are required to donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups, they ultimately decide to which group their money goes. The Koch network, on the other hand, collects contributions in the nonprofit political hub Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, which then distributes the cash mostly as it sees fit to groups in the network.

But the DA document distributed in Chicago does call into question some of the plaintiff woe-is-us rhetoric bandied about by Democrats griping about the Koch brothers’ sophisticated efforts to use their checkbooks to manipulate American democracy.

Even though the DA’s cash projections pale in comparison to the Koch network, which is in a financial class by itself and rivals the official parties’ spending, they exceed those of most other outside spending operations on the right and left. And, perhaps more significantly, the briefing highlights what liberals believe is superior coordination between its deep-pocketed labor unions, outside groups and even the administration of President Barack Obama that has allowed their side to spend its big money more efficiently than conservatives.

An assessment of the Center for American Progress and its sister group the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which are projected to receive as much as $5.5 million from DA members this year, boasts of its work on gun control with the administration and other deep-pocketed groups in the DA’s infrastructure map.